[GOAL] Re: Who benefits from for-profit open access publishing? A case study of Hindawi and Egypt
I agree completely with what Jan and David have said. If the purpose a journal is to communicate between author and reader without frills and publisher-junk (cf. Tufte's chart-junk) then Hindawi journals come high up my list. Conversely many mainstream publishers' technical offerings are simply appalling. They create output which is designed to promote and brand the publisher rather than communicate science. As I am partially moving into plant science I have been working on content-mining (machine reading) the Hindawi International Journal of Agronomy (http://www.hindawi.com/journals/ija/ ). The content is a clear reporting of basic scientific knowledge; it may not enhance author's prestige factors in our sick metric society, but it provides material that is useful for making sure the world has enough to eat. It's honest (compliant with the Open Definition, CC-BY) well prepared and with no wasted effort on unnecessary publisher-junk (e.g. publisher marketing). In particular the content is well prepared (e.g. uses compliant HTML and Unicode, with vector graphics) while larger publishers like XXx destroy vector graphics, XXX can't even create compliant XML and Xxxx and many others actively lobby against contentmining. P. -- Peter Murray-Rust Reader in Molecular Informatics Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry University of Cambridge CB2 1EW, UK +44-1223-763069 ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: Who benefits from for-profit open access publishing? A case study of Hindawi and Egypt
David, Jan Peter: thank you for your comments. I agree with some of what you say, would like to point to where we said basically the same things in the original post. and have some comments to add: Agreed - Hindawi has a deserved reputation as a leader in scholarly publishing, and in particular for commitment to quality. I also acknowledge that Egyptian researchers can benefit by reading the OA works of others. Following are words to this effect from the original blogpost: Details, first paragraph: Hindawi is an open access commercial publishing success story and an Egyptian business success story. Hindawi Publishing Corporation was founded by Ahmed Hindawi who, in an interview with Richard Poynder conducted in September 2012, confirmed a revenue of millions of dollars from APCs alone – a $3.3 net profit on $12 million in revenue, a 28% profit rate (Poynder, 2012). Hindawi is highly respected in open access publishing circles, and was an early leader in establishing the Open Access Scholarly Publishers’ Association (OASPA), an organization that takes quality in publishing seriously. Towards the end: Egyptian researchers can read open access works of others. http://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/2015/04/10/who-is-served-by-for-profit-gold-open-access-publishing-a-case-study-of-hindawi-and-egypt/ David Prosser said: I know of no country where APCs are mainly paid from academic salaries. In the same way that centrifuges, reagents, etc., etc. tend not to be paid for from salaries. They are mainly paid from research grants and so the comparison to salaries strikes me as meaningless. Comment: one way to think of this is that there are larger pools of funds from which both academic salaries and monies for other expenses (including APCs, subscription payments, reagents) are drawn. I argue that providing funds for research per se is a necessary precondition to dissemination of research results. I further argue that research funders working in the developing world will be more effective if they prioritize funding for academic salaries, student support, and other direct supports for actually doing the research, rather than paying APCs. A subsidy of two APCs for Hindawi's Disease Markers - or a single APC of $3,000 charged by some other publishers - would pay a year's salary for a lecturer position in Egypt. Of course I am Canadian, have never been to Egypt, and do not speak Arabic. I am merely commenting on the impact of a model that I am viewing from a distance. To understand what is best for Egypt and her researchers requires in-depth knowledge of the country, consultation with and ideally leadership by Egyptian researchers themselves. best, Heather Morrison ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: Who benefits from for-profit open access publishing? A case study of Hindawi and Egypt
Hi all, The 1500 USD charged by Hindawi for the journal in question is by global standards fairly reasonable, given the impact factor level of the journal. The problem is that uniform APCs for all countries is probably unsustainable in the long run. For this reason many gold OA journals give Waivers for authors from developing countries. In this particular case authors from around 60 countries, mainly from Africa and Asia and curiously also Ukraine can get waivers. Egypt alas is not on the relevant World Bank list. The leading publishers do not charge the same amounts for big deal subscription licenses in different countries, but take into account the potential customers ability to pay (its a bit like airline ticketing). Likewise I would hope that if we convert to a dominating APC funded gold OA solution, then OA publishers will develop more tieried APC schemes than the current binominal full APC- waiver one. There are already some examples of policies with at least three levels. Bo-Christer Björk On 4/11/15 5:58 PM, Heather Morrison wrote: David, Jan Peter: thank you for your comments. I agree with some of what you say, would like to point to where we said basically the same things in the original post. and have some comments to add: Agreed - Hindawi has a deserved reputation as a leader in scholarly publishing, and in particular for commitment to quality. I also acknowledge that Egyptian researchers can benefit by reading the OA works of others. Following are words to this effect from the original blogpost: Details, first paragraph: Hindawi is an open access commercial publishing success story and an Egyptian business success story. Hindawi Publishing Corporation was founded by Ahmed Hindawi who, in an interview with Richard Poynder conducted in September 2012, confirmed a revenue of millions of dollars from APCs alone – a $3.3 net profit on $12 million in revenue, a 28% profit rate (Poynder, 2012). Hindawi is highly respected in open access publishing circles, and was an early leader in establishing the Open Access Scholarly Publishers’ Association (OASPA), an organization that takes quality in publishing seriously. Towards the end: Egyptian researchers can read open access works of others. http://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/2015/04/10/who-is-served-by-for-profit-gold-open-access-publishing-a-case-study-of-hindawi-and-egypt/ David Prosser said: I know of no country where APCs are mainly paid from academic salaries. In the same way that centrifuges, reagents, etc., etc. tend not to be paid for from salaries. They are mainly paid from research grants and so the comparison to salaries strikes me as meaningless. Comment: one way to think of this is that there are larger pools of funds from which both academic salaries and monies for other expenses (including APCs, subscription payments, reagents) are drawn. I argue that providing funds for research per se is a necessary precondition to dissemination of research results. I further argue that research funders working in the developing world will be more effective if they prioritize funding for academic salaries, student support, and other direct supports for actually doing the research, rather than paying APCs. A subsidy of two APCs for Hindawi's Disease Markers - or a single APC of $3,000 charged by some other publishers - would pay a year's salary for a lecturer position in Egypt. Of course I am Canadian, have never been to Egypt, and do not speak Arabic. I am merely commenting on the impact of a model that I am viewing from a distance. To understand what is best for Egypt and her researchers requires in-depth knowledge of the country, consultation with and ideally leadership by Egyptian researchers themselves. best, Heather Morrison ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: CC-BY and open access question: who is the Licensor?
On 2015-04-10, at 5:04 PM, Graham Triggs wrote: But practically, that is of little concern. You can stop publishing something with a CC license, but you can't revoke it. Anyone that has the work acquired under a CC license, who has done nothing to invalidate the CC license, can with proper attribution redistribute / republish that work [and perpetuate the license]. And as long as it can't be proven that the work was not acquired and used legally under a CC license (or rather, you can prove that the work was issued under a CC licence at some point, that we work in question corresponds to that CC licensed version, and that this has all been done legally in accordance with that CC licence) then there isn't anything that anybody can do about it. Comments: I have explained my background, and it would be helpful if Graham would explain his as well. For example, you have clarified that with PLOS CC licenses, PLOS is the licensor. Is this your interpretation, or are you a spokesperson for PLOS? Are you an academic, or an employee of a company seeking to profit from commercial use of academic works? Agreed, CC licenses are not revocable. This works well for the individual licensee who has a copy of a particular work. If you want to be sure of ongoing access to all of the CC licensed works, either you have to make a copy of all such works or we need repositories with a long-term commitment to public access. The public access repository solution can work for everyone; it's what I recommend. It is good advice for downstream users to retain evidence of the license terms permitting re-use. Note that this is tricker than one might think. For example, the article my group published earlier this year in MDPI's Publications is licensed CC-BY-NC-SA - but if you find this through DOAJ you'll first come across the DOAJ indication of a journal-level CC-BY license and then click through to the article which is incorrectly labelled as CC-BY. DOAJ lists many journals as CC-BY, however one should note that these journals may include works or portions of works that are not licensed CC-BY, including third party content and works that were published before the journal switched to a CC-BY default, unless the journal went through a license revision process with previous works. This could be a significant amount of work unless the journal was very small. Note that this is only one of the objections to CC-BY. In addition to my work, the RCUK implementation review document points to a number of concerns brought up by various people. I haven't gone through all the evidence to come up with a report at this time, but would note that RCUK reports that they were hearing substantive, principled objections. One such objection is academic freedom; if authors are restricted to publishing material that can be made available for blanket commercial use and re-use, this restricts what academics are able to publish. Some academics expressed concern that CC-BY would open up the possibility that their work would be sold or re-used in ways that they would not approve of. The report seems to brush off these concerns as a misinterpretation of the CC-BY license, however I think these concerns are quite realistic. As evidence, I would note that the current CC-BY license gives licensors the authority to insist that downstream users do NOT use attribution. This suggests that CC received complaints from licensors whose works were used in ways that the licensor did not want to be associated with. If a blanket license is granted, a downstream user would have to be psychic to know what kinds of commercial uses or re-uses might be acceptable or offensive to the original author. I am using author, not licensor, here on purpose; if an author publishes with PLOS as the licensor, it is important that the author's rights be respected even if PLOS is the licensor. The individual creator issuing their own work under a CC license and the more complex relationship of authors and publishers are very different matters. Hence, it does make sense to talk about publishers using CC licenses. The RCUK policy review document can be found here: http://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/2015/04/10/who-is-served-by-for-profit-gold-open-access-publishing-a-case-study-of-hindawi-and-egypt/ best, -- Dr. Heather Morrison Assistant Professor École des sciences de l'information / School of Information Studies University of Ottawa http://www.sis.uottawa.ca/faculty/hmorrison.html Sustaining the Knowledge Commons http://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/ heather.morri...@uottawa.ca ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] OAI9 poster submission deadline
The OAI Workshop on Current Developments in Scholarly Communication is being held in the University of Geneva on 17-19 June 2015. It has a call for posters. The deadline is 17 April 2015. See http://indico.cern.ch/event/332370/page/6 for more details. The Workshop will contain 6 plenary session, focussing on the following topics: 1. A Technical Open Access/Open Science session led by Herbert Van de Sompel 2. Barriers and Impact 3. Open Science Workflows: CHORUS and SHARE 4. Quality Assurance 5. Institution as Publisher 6. Digital Curation and preservation of large and complex scientific objects Use https://indico.cern.ch/event/332370/registration/ to register. Cheers, Thomas Krichel http://openlib.org/home/krichel skype:thomaskrichel ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
